@cstross Something I feel all these pieces miss is how the demographics play into this. The need to grow enormously and the need to spend so much money on everything that there is no real impact of doing it wrong (no nega feedback loop) is intimately linked to the fact the retirement schemes money needs to get invested somewhere. And there was bluntly not enough stuff to invest in.
So we have a whole industry dedicated to finding ways to do this, and modern management is the answer to that.